 Oh, yeah I think so The visual design has been doing amazing work, so let's give a hand Okay, can you hear me? Thank you So yeah, we're gonna talk a little bit about visions because we didn't talk about enough before Let's spend a little more time on it. So I want to talk a little bit about this because Obviously as you've heard Thomas mentioned earlier It's one of the things that drive us in the visual design group. I've been learning a lot more about it over the last year a year and a half There was a time when I started when I just started the visual design group where I just wanted to put together pretty pictures and Thomas and Haikou and a few people have been encouraging me to not just put together pretty pictures But um have a purpose when you put those pretty pictures together. So I thought we talked about that today All right, so there's a lot of there's a lot of ways to look at vision probably seen lots of visions all over the place A lot of them kind of look like these Very interesting, I mean they they they can motivate people can be really really really interesting to have a Exciting sounding vision, but in a lot of cases they're not very useful And this is an example of several of them mom and they kind of just distill in general What doesn't work so well when you put together a vision? I'll give you some examples Just so you know, it's kind of what So some examples from the real world I like the computer so it's not anything about Dell, but it doesn't get any more vague than that It really doesn't I mean it tells you nothing about what it is that they're trying to do Yeah, everybody wants to be good. Everyone knows that I don't think anyone goes out there and sets out to be the least successful computer company So this is another I don't even know who they are, but I googled really bad visions Got that And you can probably find a host of others so um Let's talk about a little bit about what makes a bad vision or a vision not a big V vision so vague That's kind of what we're talking about with a Dell vision lots of buzzwords synergy Yeah, they go through that. They actually have a mission statement generator online that just basically randomly puts together a bunch of buzzwords with verbs and Elaborate mission statements, and then you can go look at some of the company lots of companies mission big corporate missions And they look pretty similar to what mission statement generator produces. Um, so buzzwords It's vague two page length visions if you can't communicate your vision in about five minutes It doesn't work very well It's it takes that long to digest whatever it is that you're trying to communicate It's not doing the job that a vision should do a vision should be able to say to someone whether it's somebody on the team or Outside of the team what it is that you're trying to do what it is that you're bringing That's unique and why why anyone either in the team should participate or contribute always somebody outside the team should Use your product or use your whatever it is that you're providing whether it's a service or product Confuses the what's in the house. This is gonna fall off before long Again, there we go Confusing the what's in the house I'm an engineer by day Systems engineer system safety engineer by day one of the things that comes up quite a bit and in my line of work is engineers always forgetting What the differences between what you're trying to do and how you do it? And and systems engineering we have this thing where if you have a requirement A high-level requirement, it should tell you what to do. It shouldn't tell you how to do it Figure out what you want to do first and then once everybody's agreed on what you want to do go figure out how to do it So confusing what's in house can be you can look at some mission statement able to describe their quality system and you know The issue tracking system and we have all but they don't talk about why we have those things and really a vision should be describing the what Why is kind of sit just above the what if you look in your general hierarchy of how requirements should flow down and again vague There's a million words who vague generic picket, but it's all if it's vague if you sense vagueness You might want to think about it a little bit Okay, so good vision The two other ones that most people focus on it It needs to have focus it needs to give you direction inspiration is the one that People often interpret as vague if you look at good vision statements, they'll still be the warm fuzzies in there So when it when you from the previous slide where I mentioned vague, it's not a good thing to have in a vision You also don't want to vision so Spartan so devoid of meaning and and passion that nobody cares what it is that you're doing Inspiration matters So yeah, you can still have some of the warm fuzzies in your vision, but it does matter to include You know get at the warm fuzzies after you've defined the specifics of the focus and direction and add pink glasses to all your For inspiration your vision can and should be bold it should be achievable So nothing that is just completely out of your reach But if you just mention a vision that you can achieve too easily then it won't Exactly give inspiration because people will just do what they're already doing anyway, and so it won't help so In your vision you should set a goal that is above what you already have but of course still achieve All right, so this is just an example there are million ways to come up with visions Do not take this as canonical this happens to be one of the things that we it's in the Hig When you're trying to come up with a concept for your project and they say come up with a vision for your project It's just an aid to walk through How what the elements that are probably useful in coming up with a vision and this applies more specifically to an application or product But you might substitute a few things in and out if you're talking about organizations or communities I won't get into the specifics of that so but I will give you an example of a really really good vision I couldn't I saw this on the on the on the internets this morning, and I couldn't pass it up So I added it this morning. Sorry Thomas Really good example of vision everybody's mentioned it before So in doing a little bit of research for the tiny little bit of research I did for this presentation It doesn't matter where I go I keep coming back to this creature I It is rare to find a vision statement that is as clear as precise as inspirational as this is And I'm not talking about within free software. I'm talking about anywhere, and it's not just the words I remember when the creature team came up with this and announced it and I was one of the what I want to give What are you doing? But what's really cool is I it blew me away every single time that I saw the next step that they announced on the plant kitty Ian you keep seeing them just rolling progressing each time and There's there's a Seattle and there's there's one arches there He occasionally shows up at some of our local conferences, and he has kitty. He has creeped out and I saw I met him last November it was I think Valerie and I Saw him doing his stuff. He's an artist. That's what he does He's not a developer and to see him use this tool and Produce what he produces. I it was I mean it became crystal clear This vision wasn't just a bunch of words. It drove a product that is Unparalleled by every definition. I mean you talk to these guys and they love it to death It's amazing what a vision can do when you use it well and let it drive the project As you can see here that vision doesn't exclude anything specifically It doesn't say we do not do this and we do not want to have that so Theoretically if someone wanted to do something that is not particularly useful for digital painting they could still do it and It probably wouldn't be rejected but this is what the team focuses on and this is what they want to do right and do best and So yeah, some people feel that oh it might exclude some ideas It doesn't have to it still provides focus and it still produces a great product so so as an example, but here's some of the things that We see that visions can do Before I get too deeply into this it's really important From the previous slides that if you have a project that you're working on It's not about just coming up with a vision for a product and what it was really important in the example that'll example to it What are you guys? What do you think about yourselves? What is it that you're trying to create a vision for? It's not so you kind of you go through this navel-gazing exercise of defining yourself to try to understand What it is that you're actually doing it it matters in that and from the previous conversation I don't want to editorialize too much, but if it's about community Then define what that is It matters to have that navel-gazing exercise to define what it is that you're trying to do To define your vision. Okay, I'll get back to the slide. Sorry for the editorial. Okay Vision enables you to do stuff if you create a vision that's not enabling you to do stuff Stop it's gonna be pretty words So create a vision with a view to enabling you to do specific things Visual design group kind of focusing user interface design. So we're going to talk a little bit about those Identify applicable personas. We'll talk about what personas are target scenarios that that you want to Develop to connect your user to the to the goals that they're trying to accomplish their user stories Make better you a design decisions We all want to make better you a design decisions one of the great things about having a vision and all the things that flow down from that is it helps you actually have a Sensible conversation about how to design your user interface and if for clarity There's a lot of people that have really good user interface design skills. It does not mean that you aren't doing this kind of Intuitive connection to the vision in the background So a lot of people are really good user interface design. They can without something But a lot of times what's actually happening in the back the back of their brains is this connection Well, what is it that they're trying to do with this project? How can we connect what they're trying to do to the user interface design? other general things that actually is really really helpful project manager What's in scope and out of school? This is yes. There's some time is okay Well, somebody wants us to develop a sorting algorithm and put it into KDE let's say Maybe we don't need that in Dolphin. Maybe that's not maybe you know There's some things that just don't belong and having that focus actually helps to say this doesn't belong in this specific I mean, we've done media players. There's tons of them Do I necessarily want my media player to do slideshows sometimes you do because that's what we want our product to do Maybe we don't it just depends on what you're trying to do and then prioritization. This is what Thomas talked about It's sometimes it's not about saying no Sometimes it's about okay. We have limited resources. Where do we apply them? Because I think this is great, but he came up with a slide a tagline that there's one tagline which has become sort of famous by now within our community Which is the the VDG's tagline Simple by default powerful when needed so this is this is just it isn't a vision because It yeah, it doesn't contain the necessary parts in it Well, it isn't vague because you can everybody understands what it means and Apparently it's catchy enough that people remember it pretty quickly, but I wouldn't say it necessarily replaces a vision because It's just too short for that, but it it complements vision quite well Because yeah on the one hand you can of course use it for Internal communication because if you discuss with someone, maybe you don't want to repeat the vision every time but if you just mention your tagline and then often you can already pretty quickly decide whether your idea is in line with that tagline and Yeah, of course, it's also really useful for outside communication and for for marketing and promo so not only we know about that tagline, but a lot of people outside as well and People when when I put out that tagline in a blog post I didn't only get positive reactions some some people reacted negatively to it, but that was also In a way a good thing because people who don't agree with that tagline Probably won't agree with our with what we do anyway, so they they can just see okay This is something I want to use Then fine, then I can look forward to what the BDG and KDE in general will produce and if I don't like that Then maybe I should go look as well Yeah, and another Example which wasn't officially agreed, but somehow came up is Plasma get stuff done so when when David practiced his talk from yesterday With me, I saw I thought hey David You just presented a tagline for plasma and you probably weren't even aware of it and but still it's something that Probably most of the plasma team already agrees upon and it just hasn't been really Formulated as this is our tagline yet, but yeah, as you can see this is really something that Can easily show people what plasma is about and as such it's awesome Yeah, I Don't have a whole lot. I mean it's it's a great communication tool. It's almost like a mental link to your vision It's a quick way to say hey this is in line or out of line with our vision So yeah, taglines are great. I'm like So I'm not gonna say a whole lot on this because this is Thomas's domain, but what I'm sorry No, one of the things that I Found I've learned over the last year and a half that visions allow you to do is it really provides the boundaries the scope For developing these kind of essential things that that's helpful for user interface design Yeah, well many of you probably have already heard of the concept some of you maybe have not so yeah persona is a fictional Character created to represent the different user types that might use a product in a similar way so Ideally and in the in the original concept personas were meant to be based on actual user research and user data and this is still the the best way to do them because Yeah, if you don't have data then it's still sort of guesswork, but Most cases even guesswork based personas are still better than having nothing at all because even if the The perception of the team that the team has about the users doesn't Exactly match the the actual users then even then you still have Can make sure that everyone is talking about the same thing because if you don't express What you think or how you think the users are then everybody in the team has their own Their own representation and their own thoughts about the users and Different people will have different focus and sometimes they may even argue about something and each team member thinks he's right or she because they They have their own user group in mind and once you have made this explicit and said, okay, we agree that We think or know ideally know How I do this are then Yeah, you can you can have come on ground to this to base your discussions on You can also use them to target who you're trying to actually build your project for Sometimes you might want to try to build it for everyone. You can't pick someone or two or three Exactly. So, yeah, that's that's also important Even if you have several user target user groups and therefore several personas You should still or you have to still have a primary persona and say, okay This has to work really well for this persona. We can add features for the other personas as long as they don't hamper the experience of the primary persona then yeah scenarios are a description of what a persona using a product or Yeah, a scenario where a persona uses a product to achieve a certain goal. So this is on a higher level than user stories so for example, I know one scenario for media player might for example be a party So the the persona might be someone who has a lot of friends and wants to impress them with their cool technology they're using and Yeah, they're they're at a party and for example at the party everyone is allowed to To choose the music Yeah, so that that isn't yet a user story But it describes in general what is happening in this situation and it has important implications on the actual user stories Yeah, and then the user story is the the lower level where for example Persona representing a guest at the party wants to change the track to Something else from within the the media library And yeah, so there are of course several of those user stories within the scenario and the user stories are then The thing which is translated into actual features So like we like we've mentioned several times before they provide the basics for building great user interfaces and as we mentioned they derived from a Good vision not a terrible vision. You can't get anything from a terrible vision. So I'm about to go through some Example This is stuff that Thomas and I kind of work through I don't even think I have all of your comments captured in it and this is not meant to be hey the plasma team go do this That's not what this is meant to be so plasma team. It's okay So This has been I Confess this is this is something Thomas has been thinking about for a while I've kind of glum down to it and it was the desktop configuration for plasma And you know Thomas has had some thoughts about this for a while. You can either slam the plasma team now. I'm just kidding But so we're thinking about this and so what we wanted to do was well What if we went through this exercise and this was like last year? and No vision here has been approved by the plasma team Let's get that out of the way. This was how can we what what will we use to guide? For example, but the design of our desktop configuration if we were to propose a new design and What we can talk offline about this plasma team whether or not this is something Okay, so we came up with this vision or I came up with this vision and Thomas did an object strenuously to it So I'm glad that the best app provides an easy to use workspace efforts that you can read So this is this is what we use to kind of Guide the the next few steps in The design Katie has some pre-packaged personas that you can use if you're doing your own work, so you can go I think they're linked in the Hig. Yeah, in fact, I know they're linked in the Hig So if you if you go to the Hig and you're trying to find personas for your project There's some pre-packaged ones and what I found is that in most instances they cover most of The the names that you need for So you'll see these names here. They're actual names from the personas. They were created back in Katie for by the way What are we calling it these days is it okay, whatever so Susan Philip and Santiago their personas for from the from the standard Pre-packaged personas and when you read their stories you read when you read who they are. It'll make sense why we use them So we came up with several scenarios. I think they're probably about 7 8 9 10 scenarios. I forget how many there are This is an example of one of them. It's so it's really wordy But the point is to hey sit down and think about what it is that you people are going to be using your thing your widget your Product whatever it is and come up with these scenarios and it kind of helps with the design As it turns out the next few slides will not be about this scenario, but I just want to show you what a scenario looks like Okay, so screenshots are coming up another mock-ups are coming up. These are not screenshots. These are mock-ups Yeah, don't freak out Okay, so the screen the mock-ups are really about well What if we kind of tried to refine our panel configuration stuff? Oh, by the way, this has been out on the community dot KD dot org wiki for like the last Ever I mean like it's been out for months So this isn't new stuff. It's been out there for a while So you can't see anything on this wonderful high resolution screen But the idea I'm going to walk through what this design essentially does for just the panel configuration Okay, so pretend that you click a button here and that's the the selection or many And you select it. Hey, I want to edit my panel So that's kind of a dialoguey thing. You can read the thing below it that you can guess what So there's a little black bar above it. There's some grab handles on there the hovers or hover over the Mouse over over the the panel app. That's a pretty much the same But you get a little bit something a little bit easier to maybe look at and read and understand in terms of what the panel configuration options are It would follow the mouse So if you hover over the top panel if you have multiple panels then that dialogue would follow on the panel that you're hovering on So the handles for the the Men max size for the panels. This is what this is supposed to show with the anchor It's just a different visualization for allowing you to to change the panel with This is what it looks like when you have your men panel set and next panel set There's a lot more on the community that kitty wiki the point is you can use Using those scenarios kind of helps you narrow down especially for the edit panel the edit panel dialogue What do you think they want to use in there? You kind of refer to your scenario your user stories to kind of figure. Well, what are they doing in the state? What they what don't they want to be doing in the state? What are things that you can recede into the background or remove from availability? When they're in the state of configuration, that's really kind of one of the things that we're focusing on Try to pull stuff away from the user Do you have anything else? so finally in Summary Visions drive projects. They drive organizations. They drive communities and it really makes it easy To do user interface design consistently So yeah, we have boss so go to them Ask us questions at the box. Okay I certainly go do the research no For the places that I've seen it Work well, and I don't have the words off the top of my head But it's it's it's a little bit what I alluded to in the naval gazing piece And knowing what you are Sometimes organizations to find themselves on the product. I so I just started a new job at Blue Origin I don't know if you guys are familiar with Blue Origin. They they build rockets, which is fun but One of the there's a welcome letter and in that welcome letter They talk about what the company's vision is and one of the things that they mentioned in there Example is We don't just we don't just build a space vehicle. We're building a company that builds space equals That focuses a lot of what happens in that Organization because it's not just about focusing on the one product It's about organization focusing on what you want to do in it when you're making those decisions day to day So for me if you're talking about community Is the community about the product or is the community about supporting a community that builds products? For example, I think there are a lot of ways for you to look at that design that vision I think it's just doing a little bit of naval gazing to try to figure out what it is Now for example the the Mozilla I know they call it mission or vision or whatever It's also it's not perfect, but it's also a nice example to draw from